Energy and Power Management (E&PM) processes have been developed to increase the energy efficiency of sites (e.g. a military base or industrial location) that are connected to a power grid (e.g. the national grid), but have one or more on-site sources of power (e.g. a source of renewable power).
A goal of such processes is that of minimising a cost of power taken from both the power grid to which the site is connected, and the on-site resources.
A problem of distributing power in a network may be treated as a Linear Programming Problem.
A centralized solution to Linear Programming Problems is described in “Linear Programming and Extensions”, Dantzig G. B. 1963, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
However, when a network becomes large, centralised E&PM tends to become difficult.
The case for addressing resource optimisation problems using a decentralised approach is discussed in “Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms”, McKay, D. J. C. 2003, Cambridge University Press, 241-247. Such decentralised approaches tend to be advantageously robust and scalable.